The Storm Lake Times - Ted Cruzhttp://www.stormlake.com/tags/ted-cruz
enWe’ll be all righthttp://www.stormlake.com/articles/2014/08/29/we%E2%80%99ll-be-all-right
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px;">Farm income is supposed to fall nationally by 14% this year, the US Department of Agriculture forecast on Tuesday, to the lowest level in four years. It would be worse were it not for livestock fetching higher prices this year. Corn is leading the way to softer revenues with a 15% drop in price from last year. It would take an 18% increase in yields to make up for the price drop, according to our ciphering. That may be in the offing, as we have seldom seen a better-looking corn crop from the car window. You just don’t know until it’s in the bin.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">This goes by way of saying that the sky is not falling.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Iowa farmers have enjoyed bountiful incomes since 2008, at least. Perhaps they stored up supplies for this rainy day of a season. Cash rents will take a haircut, but farmland prices in Iowa appear to be holding steady.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Farmers, landlords and bankers are taking a cautious approach. We’re told that some bankers will not allow their clients to bid more than $250 per acre for cash rent next spring. Landlords were getting used to rents north of $300 per acre.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Everybody will make their adjustments. The Iowa economy will continue to chug along. Recall not so long ago when corn prices could not reach $2 per bushel. We still sold combines and pickups. Prices are at least 50% higher today.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">It strikes us that Iowa State University economist and administrator John Lawrence got it right a couple years ago when he told us that $4 per bushel is about the plateau where corn will settle over time. Inputs and rents will have to meet that number over the next year or two.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">China has doubled its stockpile of corn, rice and wheat over the past year. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. China holds about 40% of the world’s corn stocks. It is in the midst of building storage facilities to house 50 million metric tons more of corn to deal with crop surpluses through 2015.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">If the grain analysts are correct, China will not make big moves in the corn markets this year or next. China consumes more US corn than any other trading partner and can move the markets in Chicago quickly.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">And, it does not appear that ethanol will gobble up much more corn than it does now.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;"><span class="pullquote">We’ve had a pretty nice run over the past six years. Now we’re in for a couple or three down years, possibly. But when you drive past that seven-feet-tall corn you have to think that we will take the blow and move ahead.</span></span></span></p>
<hr /><p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong><span style="font-family: georgia, serif;">Cruz’s lapdog barks</span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">President Obama is expected to announce any day now a series of executive actions directed toward undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The proposals leaked out to the Washington press corps involve doubling the number of green cards issued annually to more than 700,000 per year. It also would grant permanent legal status for certain relatives of US citizens and permanent residents, including the children of undocumented immigrants.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., says that it will legalize about half of the undocumented immigrants in the US.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Obama is essentially proposing what the Senate already passed on a broad, bipartisan basis. The comprehensive overhaul of our broken immigration system was killed in the House at the hands of our own Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, who wakes up every morning thinking of ways to insult about half of Storm Lake’s residents.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">So the Storm Lake Police go on dealing with people using fake personas so the officers never know on the spot precisely with whom they are dealing. Buena Vista University will struggle recruiting Latino students from Storm Lake because they do not qualify for any federal or state financial aid programs. Families will be split apart as otherwise law-abiding parents are deported primarily through bad luck.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">At first King said that Obama taking executive action would result in an impeachment effort. King’s new puppetmaster, Ted Cruz, said thereafter that impeachment is off the table. Now King says that the House Republicans will move to shut down the government if Obama takes executive action. The only way the shutdown could be avoided is to order the children of undocumented immigrants to be deported.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">The president must make some sense of a senseless system. Storm Lake cannot continue to operate with a quarter of its population in virtual hiding. They are less likely to report crime to police for fear of being deported. They move in the middle of the night with their children, interrupting the efforts of schools and frustrating landlords. They operate in a cash, and often black-market, economy because they cannot open a bank account. And, they perform jobs in the USA that no one else will do but are barred from bettering their status because they are here illegally — because our system makes no accommodation for the poor Mexican who just wants to work in an Iowa meatpacking plant.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;">Obama should issue orders. We hope that King then moves to impeach or shut down the government so he can meet his comeuppance.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif;"><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/ArtSignature.png" style="width: 213px; height: 64px;" /> </span></span></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/editorial">Editorial</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/art-cullen">Art Cullen</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/farm-income">Farm income</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/us-department-agriculture">US Department of Agriculture</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/immigration">Immigration</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/ted-cruz">Ted Cruz</a></div></div></div>Fri, 29 Aug 2014 13:31:17 +0000clare@stormlake.com5104 at http://www.stormlake.comA leveling off http://www.stormlake.com/articles/2013/10/31/leveling
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; ">When Iowa State University economist Mike Duffy speaks, bankers and farmers listen. He is the leading farmland value tracker in the state, and his Thanksgiving-time reports on annual land price surveys are awaited with bated breath in the ag sector. Duffy recently chatted with Agriculture.com (Successful Farming) about historic price run-ups and subsequent crashes, and concluded with this remark:</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">“The most important variable to watch is farm income. What happens to farm income will have a direct bearing on land values. … I think some of the factors that created the busts we saw after the past two booms haven’t been as strong this time.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">Duffy refers to two boom-bust cycles and the current boom. The first “golden era” was from 1900 to 1920, when land shot up five times in price. The second was from 1973 to 1981, when farm prices rose by three times. Land values dropped by 73% from 1920 to 1933 as the Roaring 20s quieted to the Great Depression. The second land crash saw land prices drop 63% from 1981 to 1986. During each of those periods, bankers freely loaned and farmers eagerly borrowed to buy land that could only appreciate in price. Or so they thought.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">From 2004 to 2012, Iowa farmland prices nearly tripled. Banks were not as easy and farmers not so eager to borrow. Most of the high-dollar buys were with half cash down from existing strong operators looking to expand. Farm income during that period rose 340%.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">As farm income stabilizes, absent heavy debt loads, Duffy expects a leveling to occur in land values.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">“I do not think land values will continue to increase as they have in the past few years,” Duffy said. “There has been too much pressure put on farmland prices to be sustainable. Farmland value increases of over 60% in two years are not sustainable.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">“I think double-digit increases in land values might be over for now. I also think if the projections for income old, then we will see a decline in land values. … I don’t think a collapse is a high probability.”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">Many of his colleagues at Iowa State believe we are entering a new world food paradigm that will support Iowa farm income. As soil erodes, productivity declines and population increases, commodity prices should rise. But those dynamics also were in play in the 1980s. Events can disrupt theoretical trend lines. Rising farm income is not guaranteed — far from it. Corn prices that dropped from more than $7 per bushel to just over $4 in a year should be testament enough that farming does not defy gravity. It is reassuring to hear Duffy say he does not see a crash ahead. Sometimes the headlights on that freight train can be obscured.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:16px;"><strong><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">Cruz and the Iowa GOP</span></strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">Ted Cruz was all the rage in Iowa Republican circles last weekend. He came to dinner in Des Moines to a sold-out crowd. Chuck Grassley was mugging it up with him. Terry Branstad kept a respectful distance. State Party Chairman AJ Spiker called the Cruz show a “smashing success.” Next morning, he was up with the roosters and Steve King for a pheasant hunt near Le Mars. Senate candidate Sam Clovis of Sioux City was there hoping to be seen and surely heard but not shot. Branstad excepted, they congratulated him for being a true patriot of the contemporary Tea Party style: for reading Dr. Seuss, among other things, for 21 hours on the Senate floor in vain hopes of repealing the Affordable Care Act. They ate green eggs and drank in themselves. King called Cruz a straight shooter.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">So it went with a blast that the flocks began to form and the Iowa Caucus season opened.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">One would think that Cruz would triumph with Iowa’s Republicans were the caucuses next weekend. This from the man who would claim to carry the spear that lanced the party’s popularity bubble. Never in the history of Gallup has the Republican Party been so dimmed in the eyes of the public, including Iowa. Branstad holding his nose in the second row is a sign that others will come. The caucuses are not held until a year from next January.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">It could be a great test for the Iowa Republican Party if Ted Cruz and Chris Christie — the Republican from New Jersey who embraced President Obama in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy — made the caucuses their battle, mano a mano. That confrontation could settle for some time the chasm on display at the Lincoln Dinner last Friday evening. Such a match-up could refocus the state party on being a state party, and redefine the Republican Party for a new generation.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; ">We hope Cruz comes back to do some fishing on Storm Lake. And we hope Christie is right behind him. Because, the Iowa Caucuses will actually determine if the Republican Party wants to win or just shoot, and if it is a party that wants to govern or just burn things down in the name of patriotism.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:14px;"><span style="font-family: georgia, serif; "><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/ArtSignature.png" style="width: 213px; height: 64px; " /></span></span></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/editorial">Editorial</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/art-cullen">Art Cullen</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/land-values">Land values</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/mike-duffy">Mike Duffy</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/ted-cruz">Ted Cruz</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/tags/republican-party">Republican party</a></div></div></div>Thu, 31 Oct 2013 16:54:23 +0000clare@stormlake.com1600 at http://www.stormlake.com